Sweden’s “iZettle” expands across Europe

Sweden’s iZettle which provides technology that turns mobile phones into card payment terminals, is now preparing to expand into Europe, beginning with a launch this week in Denmark, Finland and Norway. During the beta phase iZettle is making 5,000 chip-card readers per country available free of charge. A UK launch is also on the cards.

The iZettle card reader and accompanying application enables merchants to accept card payments using iPhones, iPods and iPads. It is similar to US offerings from Square, Intuit and VeriFone but works with chip, rather than mag-stripe, cards.

Launched last August, with a full scale commercial roll out in November, the service already has 25,000 active users in Sweden.

Jacob de Geer, CEO, iZettle, says: "We estimate there are at least 20 million small businesses across Europe, not to mention all the individuals that could benefit from the iZettle service. The Nordics are just the first step of our global expansion scheduled for 2012."